Cyberknight wrote: ↑Tue Mar 26, 2024 12:38 pm
Regarding the first few points I made, you acknowledge that your new proposed design would be hard for woodwind players to transition to, which is my point.
No I don't. I think it's easy to adapt to different systems, while the significant difficulties are those of the systems themselves. To judge new ones properly, you have to make them and test them.
Any advantages would be marginal at best and heavily outweighed by disadvantages.
Well, that's something that needs to be tested. It seems very simple to me the idea that you lift one finger to go up a semitone and two to go up a tone, and playing in C# major or minor on a chromatic whistle using this system should be easy, whereas the prototype chromatic whistle I've been working with for the last few months makes that hellish. It's that work that makes me want to try something better because I naturally find myself wanting to lift one finger to go up a semitone and two to go up a tone and find that I can't on that instrument because it does things in a weird order.
The only thing I'll add on this point is that if you focus on this design rather than your original one, you're going to lose out on the potential market for people who already play whistle - particularly Irish-style whistle, which takes hundreds or even thousands of hours of practice to play at the speed required for professional playing.
I don't see the difficulty in making those as well for people who want them, but I don't think it's the best solution. Incidentally, I just saw a chromatic quena today in a new video from Domingo Uribe which uses the same fingering as the Kaval for the lower hand, and that seems to be quite a well established standard over there. It departs from the normal fingering too, but people adapt to it with ease. The recorder too doesn't fit the normal standard six hole approach. I think trying to maintain the standard six hole fingerings is shackling functionality.
As intriguing as your new design seems, I definitely would not have the patience to try it myself, because I have no interest in relearning a finger system from scratch. I have a feeling most whistle players would feel the same way - even those who, like me, are interested in greater chromaticism.
I think it's more about what can be done with it. If the fingering is different but it makes it easier to play in multiple keys, it's worth learning the new fingerings rather than limiting yourself to slower playing. Here's the thing: I've been trying to play the Turkish Dances piece (that people associate most with James Galway), and there's one high-speed part of it that I just can't do fast enough with forked fingerings, while half-holing is fast enough but insufficiently accurate when there are too many notes of that kind in a row. I hoped the prototype chromatic whistle I'm playing now might fix that, and it is certainly better than the previous two approaches, but it's still not good enough, whereas when I try the fingering for the newer idea on that whistle (which then produces the wrong notes, of course, but this is just about testing the fingering difficulty), it's much easier and therefore faster. This is a piece that I want to play at a specific high speed, and at the moment I don't have any instrument that I can do that on, but I think I could with the new design.
So while you could certainly market this thing to people who don't currently play whistle at all, and to a small minority of whistle players much more ambitious than I am, you'd lose out on (I think) a huge market if you change the design to the new one.
Well, I've already seen the high resistance from whistle players to the design you want to use, so I wouldn't attempt to market it at all beyond making it an option for people to buy if they want one.
If you ask me, this is the issue that makes experiments like the chromophone a flop each time they come out.
When I look at that one I don't feel any desire to own one because the upper notes are a mess which could have been avoided by using fingering like the kaval for the lower hand (which is a much better way of avoiding using the lower thumb for a note in the interest of stability and which I might end up using for that reason).
I wouldn't use the term "equally easy," because it doesn't seem like any key would be "easy" at all. As far as I can make out, no key on your new proposed design would be easier to play than on your old design, and about half the keys would be more difficult. Look at your new design, and look at your old design. Think about playing the hardest key on your old design (probably C sharp major). How would that be any easier on your new design? It wouldn't. It would require just as many gymnastics with all 10 fingers. There'd be just as much finger movement as on your old design But now, lots of OTHER keys will also require 10-finger gymnastics and increased finger movement. I just don't see how it makes any sense.
I've been playing quenas of my own design where pinkies are used instead of fourth fingers, but I also play other quenas, quenillas and whistles which use the fourth fingers. I initially treated both fingers as a single unit in order to make the transition, and it doesn't feel like any kind of gymnastics to do such a trivially easy thing. On the prototype chromatic whistle it's just the same except both fingers are covering or uncovering holes at the same time, but that's no different from playing arpeggios, so it doesn't present any kind of challenge. I'm limited in how much I can push my fingers without running into repetitive strain injury issues (which led me to have to give up playing the guitar), but this "extra work" isn't pushing me into any difficulty.
I mean, sure, C sharp major might be slightly more "intuitive" to an absolute beginner on your new design than on your old design. But the amount of finger movement would be the same for both, and any initial advantage you got from greater intuitiveness would vanish extremely quickly.
Again you're assuming that it's difficult, but it isn't. I'm actually considering a newer idea now though which uses half holing for C# (assuming for this illustration that the bell note is C) and then runs up the rest of the notes from there one hole per semitone, so the lower hand then has the same fingering as a kaval, but with the thumb being lifted for F#. I'll make an instrument of each kind and test them extensively.
Piano is a bit of an outlier due to its extreme chromatic capabilities, but even on piano, there are some keys that pianists much prefer to play in.
If the piano had a black key between every pair of white keys, there would only be two scales to learn and you'd then know the lot. Reach would be easier too. By having an extension of each black key stick out nearer the player and lower than the white keys, you'd also have more choice about which fingers to use for which notes so as to make things easier than they are now. That's another instrument that's trapped by convention, but it's much more expensive to innovate and make prototypes.
But what does not make sense is making MOST keys more difficult and NO keys easier, just to equalize the difficulty for all keys. It's better to have some easy keys and some hard keys than to have all the keys be hard.
The whole point is to make them easier, and this does just that, while the way I judge difficulty is by playing real tunes on them. The most difficult part of Turkish Dances is this (upper hand only and with the thumb hole under standard hole #2 represented by a smaller letter) - this is a sequence of notes:-
X xO O O , O xO O O , X xO O O , X oX O O , X xX X O , X oX O O , X xO O O , X xX X O ,
X oX O O , X xO O O , O oO O O , X oX O O , X xX X X , X xX X O , X oX O O , X xX X X ,
X xX X O
That's on my current chromatic prototype and it's easier to play it on that than any other instrument that I have, but there's still room for improvement. It's the small "o"s where the thumb has to lift that cause the trouble, and not through stability issues, but just be being counterintuitive in that you have to lift when going up the scale and then close the hole again when going further up. It would be easier to do one or other of the following to produce all the same notes:-
x O O O O , o O O O O , x O O O O , x X O O O , x X X X O , x X O O O , x O O O O , x X X X O ,
x X O O O , x O O O O , o O O O O , x X O O O , x X X X X , x X X X O , x X O O O , x X X X X ,
x X X X O
That one's for the design where Bb needs to be half holed or forked, while the next one is for the design where the C# is half holed.
x X O O O o , o O O O O o , x X O O O o , x X X O O o , x X X X X o , x X X O O o , x X O O O o , x X X X X o ,
x X X O O o , x X O O O o , o O O O O o , x X X O O o , x X X X X x , x X X X X o , x X X O O o , x X X X X x ,
x X X X X o
But your preferred design has two thumb holes too, and a bigger instability issue when the lower one is lifted.
I'm not seeing how it has a bigger instability issue.
The issue is with Eb (on a C whistle) where the thumb is lifted off and two fingers are pressing down - that's the hardest note to play because of the instability issue. A loop for the fourth finger to press up against would help to resolve it. With my alternative designs there's a lesser issue of this kind because while the thumb still has to lift off for a note (and can be optionally kept off for several more), when it's off, no fingers from that hand are pressing down, but a loop would still improve things. There is another option though of not having a thumb hole for the lower hand and having kaval fingering for the lower hand (so C# has to be half holed) combined with the fingering from the first of the two designs above where where Bb needs to be half holed or forked, so that would work fine without needing a loop, but with two notes being harder to form instead of just one.
In which case I would say, fine, go ahead and add a thumb ring to the design you've already made, and now there's certainly no bigger instability issue than there would be with your new design.
It isn't a thumb ring - it would be for the fourth finger to push up against.
I'm having difficulty understanding why you're having trouble holding the whistle. Perhaps it's the material you're using, which is more slippery?
No; it's entirely to do with forces changing when you lift the thumb off. The instrument moves more for this particular move than for any other finger. It's even worse in quenilla mode (without the whistle adaptor) where that wobble affects the blowing.
I guess your focus is less on how ergonomic it is and more on how the new approach you're talking about is "intuitive."
It's both. I'm looking for the system that will enable me to play the difficult stuff fastest, and whichever design ends up providing that, that's the one I'll go with for my own use.
Plus, it sounds like you're focusing way too much on the ease of playing a chromatic scale, which should be a relatively low priority for a chromatic instrument.
That isn't a priority for me at all. The problem I'm having is in running up and down through the awkward notes while playing normal tunes.